


Nothing Gold can Stay

by rAdiantOrdam



Category: Uncharted (Video Games)
Genre: Loss of Parent(s), Memories, Nostalgia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-21
Updated: 2017-04-21
Packaged: 2018-10-22 01:36:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10687083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rAdiantOrdam/pseuds/rAdiantOrdam
Summary: He comes back to mother's place; she's not there. It's the same feeling, even after years.





	Nothing Gold can Stay

It's been two hours, maybe even a whole day. Father pulls up to mother's "abandoned" cottage, just south of the White Mountains. He gets out of the car and it's so numb to push the wooden door to her house, the door that he once had been afraid to touch in caution of getting splinters. He doesn't care anymore, and sometimes he'd rather let it pierce his skin. The place had nearly been rotted with water, the carpet squishes, soaked under his boot. He doesn't dare set foot in mother's room. He has not been here since he had grown wild with incredulity, when she was nowhere in sight, when the neighbors had said she had moved with no word to him. He had never known. 

She was here, now she's not. 

She was here, now she's not. 

While father discusses the topics of repair and rent to some clients, in his interest to sell it, he treks up on the stairs and pleads time to slow; the walls are bare of the paintings. When he enters mother's room, a dare he challenged himself by, he sees that there are holes in the walls, walls left neglected from years, even deserted by termites, of no maintenance after her absence. It's highlighted by the rays of his flashlight. Everything is dark - black and blue in this room. The sun has barely recovered from it's slumber. Only his flashlight brings the comfort of light. Walking here is like filming another episode of a ghost hunting show that he never could tell if they were real or not. But it doesn't matter; the absence of mother haunts him beyond the capability of a ghost.

There's a clear line that separates dry and wet on them. Of course, it is so different. The non existence of her bed, her dresser, her lamp, her desk, her television screen - in this very room that once was inhabited by mother. He maps the location of everything, performing it like a ritual - like a ritual that will bring her back, despite all the echoes in his head that call him out on being rather ludicrous. The room is malodorous of what smells like lichened moss and oil paint. It's so familiar. But everything's not here.

She's gone, from this place. There is nothing in this room for him to keep, for a memoir of her. Then he thinks why? Why is it worth it? If she is such the figure, the one he looks up as a mother, the one he knows of a warmed heart and empathy, why does she leave him, out of intention?

He stays for another half-hour, as a hopeless deputy in this forlorn house that used to be of mother's. He sits down on the still polished planks and then he's standing up -- just to fall again and roll and rock himself on his back like the wooden rocking chair that was once in her living room. His pokerface of kevlar, his stone heart, and a logic of emotions that could possibly be more dense than steel - they all thaw as he cries a little more, too quiet for the man downstairs to hear. Even in armor, he is but a man. He cries so much.


End file.
